


sunshine

by orphan_account



Category: Doctor Who RPF
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:51:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written as a songfic for "Sunshine," by Christine - http://soundcloud.com/elsinore-rose/sunshine</p>
            </blockquote>





	sunshine

Matt’s miracle is his endless heart; he takes her by the hand, and swallows up the night for her. It’s a gift she can’t ever hope to repay, but Karen tries. Tries to tell him just how changed she is, just what he’s done for her – he doesn’t know how lost she was, before.

 

She tells him, but not in words; she tells him in the early hours of the morning, when they are cradled together against the storm of life, wrapped in a cocoon of  _let’s just stop the world._ She tries to tell him with breakfasts in bed, and late-night phone calls, and a head rested on his shoulder on long bus trips and car rides. He knows by the way their worlds have lost their plurality, by the way her hand will invariably snake into his when they’re unobserved for even a minute, by the way she smiles with her eyes too, now.

 

When they come together, it’s like Karen doesn’t even exist anymore. She is never herself with him – or at least not the  _self_  that she’s come to accept. She disappears; in her place is a new person, entirely composed of sunshine. This girl, this shining creature almost entirely unrecognisable to Karen, is free; unscarred and unblemished; beautiful.

                                                                                                                                    

She is gone, replaced by sunshine and starlight, and she couldn’t be happier, and she could not  _be_  any sadder. They just…spin together, and that shouldn’t be sad – but it is when it’s over, as she knows it will be.

 

Karen dreams of it, sometimes – dreams she wakes up and Matt is gone. Sometimes it’s because he’s dead. Not dying, just….dead. In those dreams, she’ll wake up with a heaviness where her heart was, and remember that he’s gone. Going through her days knowing he wont be back – its harder than Karen thinks it should be, and she wakes up exhausted to her core every time the dreams occurs. Even those aren’t the worst, though.

 

The very worst dreams – she can’t bring herself to call them nightmares, because that would make the fear real – are the ones where Matt is…not. The dream goes like this; she’s at work, dressed and made-up and ready to save the world as Amy Pond, and asks someone when Matt’s getting there. And they say,  _Matt? Who’s Matt?_

_Never heard of him,_ they tell her, and then Karen remembers that there is no Matt. That there never was a person called Matt, that she never even met the man who brought her back to life. And she can feel herself buckle and crumble under the weight of this…fact; in the dream, it is a literal crumbling, as first her hands, then her arms, then her shoulders, begin to fall away to ash. As the ash reaches her heart and then her head, the oblivion is welcome, and when Karen wakes up, heart pounding in her chest as if to remind her it hasn’t  crumbled yet, she remembers just how close she was to that endless unfeeling dark before Matt pulled her back from the edge.

 

But the wonderful about waking up – about being woken up, in every sense and every possible way – is that Matt  _is_ here. He’s never not in her life anymore; even when they don’t see each other for weeks (which is a rarity, by now) Karen keeps him with her, like an endlessly looped song, the soundtrack to their life together. Memories pop up every now and then – in the shower, when she’s trying to sleep, when she’s supposed to be talking to someone – small memories of totally insignificant occurrences, like the time she was ill and he went out in the sleeting rain to get Lemsip, or the way his hair looks first thing in the morning, or the exact shade of green his eyes take on in the setting-sunlight.

 

She realises in those weeks away from him just how  _right_  he makes everything; how changed she is, how much less broken. When the dreams return in the second week, they’re made worse by how plausible they are, and it scares her. Scares her how bound to this one person she is, how dependent she feels, because she knows the days are coming where she will have to survive solitude again. Soon, he’ll leave, or – more likely – she’ll leave, replaced by a new companion. Someone else to hold his hand, to occupy his days and his nights with rehearsals and line learning and shooting and corporate events. It’s not so much jealousy as acceptance; Karen doesn’t resent the future, but she knows it’s coming, knows it with all that she is, and she knows she needs to be ready.

 

Except she isn’t, and she can’t be, not when the  _now_ feels so perfect. Filled with light.

Real.

 

She loses herself in this reality, lets him replace her with the sunshine he swears he sees in her (not that she believes him, but it’s easy to pretend.) For him – with him – because of him – Karen becomes a girl made of sunshine and laughter, starlight and moonbeams and happiness.

 

Karen is all too aware of the danger she’s in. She’s falling. Falling further and faster than she ever though possible, tumbling through regrets and mistakes and ghosts like they simply don’t affect her anymore – the sunshine girl thinks that everything is easy, and it’s all too tempting to tell him so.

_______________________________________________________________________

The “I love you” almost slips through her fingers, and it takes all she has to stop and catch them before he hears.

________________________________________________________________________________

 He tells her all the time – of  _course_ he tells her all the time – and with each passing day that she refuses to let herself say them back, to let the three syllables trip over her tongue and attach themselves to the gift that is the sound of his name, presses down on her with all the weight of the sky. He’s waiting, too, even if he hopes she doesn’t notice: waiting for her to catch up, to accept this short united infinity they’ve been granted, to become the sunshine girl because she can.

 

The three words pump through her veins,  hotter and faster and infinitely more painful than the blood they have replaced – and finally, Karen thinks she can’t stand another day in this limbo. Wakes up one morning and knows there isn’t any other version of her anymore, she’s spent so long trying to hold on to the ungraspable ease of sunshine that it’s taken her until now to realise that it’s here to stay.

 

The day she tells him,  _really_ tells him, she knows what the sunshine is. Matt’s face lights up with an inner light that takes her breath away, and when he tells her that he feels like a new person, lighter, better somehow, she finally understands. It’s not that he changed her, and it’s not that the sunshine girl replaced her because he made her better, and it’s not that she disappeared with him – the sunshine is, and always has been, the reflection of her in his love-drugged eyes. Now she lets herself view him in the same strange, shifting, sensuous light, and it is without doubt the most beautiful thing she has ever seen,


End file.
